In other words, this story is not merely a jibe on the megalomania of the emperor. It’s raising the question of how the autocrat impacts on the traditional structures of the state, any state. Nero, after all, didn’t declare himself victor. He was declared victor by the usual authorities. What does that say about us, we should ask? Who dares to stand up to the emperor and say he hasn’t won?
Any adversary of the United States can very easily see—like Brasidas once did—that the entire imperial project that the Trump Administration is engaging in could collapse in on itself by the clever act of peeling off our allies from us with nothing more than the promise that they could be free.
THE DRINK IS AROMATIC, not just in terms of volatile esters, but in terms of nostalgia for its early twentieth century origins. It's a cafe drink, from a forgotten world unlike ours of today. It recalls Ezra Pound before he went full fash and had to be put in a cage, Ernest Hemingway talking loudly over the top of him and everybody else about his leftist credentials, Gertrude Bell drawing arbitrary lines on maps in the Middle East, Europeans watching the Russians suspiciously, Americans withdrawing from the world, the financial markets crashing, like I said, nothing like today. Why not make a cocktail and enjoy the ennui?
THE IDEOLOGICAL BASIS TO the American tariffs, and to whatever else the hell they seem to be doing to their economy and society, has a long-standing history.
If you recognise a culture that elevates masculinity, views femaleness as both sacred and degrading at the same time, values conformity in thought, is anti-intellectual even at the same time as it ranks people on their supposed aptitude and merit, puts a value on time and encourages grinding, constant concern with work, and sees manual labour as itself as a virtue, you know exactly what I’m describing. An agenda that will destroy a whole economy on the chance that a manufacturing sector will return, to save a working population from emasculating email and service jobs?
THE LIBERAL CANDIDATE FOR Whitlam in this Federal election believes that women should not serve in combat roles in the ADF. This is at the obvious level just evidence that the man is a gronk. His views about women are backward, creepy, juvenile, and most importantly, wrong. At a grander level though this man's views aren't about women at all but about manhood and masculinity, part of the Triumph of the Operator:
The "cult of the operator" is a term used to describe the glorification and romanticization of SOF within military and political circles, particularly in the United States. It reflects an obsession with the image of the elite warrior—highly trained, rugged, and seemingly invincible—who is perceived as the ultimate solution to complex security challenges. This mindset often elevates operators to a near-mythical status, overshadowing the broader strategic, diplomatic, and conventional military considerations necessary for national security...
...But this mindset extends beyond the military sphere, influencing broader cultural narratives around masculinity and business. In popular culture and media, the elite operator archetype embodies a hyper-masculine ideal—tough, resilient, and unyielding—setting an unrealistic standard for what it means to be a "real man."
This culture of violent individualism is, needless to say, almost exactly the opposite of how I view the examined life, and the opposite of any kind of example of a worthy participation in society. It's a repulsive vision of masculinity, and provides no wonder that the kind of men who buy into it, damage themselves and damage others. It shouldn't need saying but does. And we have alternatives, both in infinitely different and more positive masculinities, and in models for how we arrange our human organisations.
THE LONG AWAITED AMERICAN tariffs are announced. They promise to be as catastrophic for the largest economy in the world, whose currency is the global reserve, as anyone had predicted. 'The Markets' as at the time of writing are responding, also, predictably, but as though they could not quite have believed that a politician who made repeated statements that he would do a thing, is on record over decades supporting a thing, once in a position to do the thing, would do the thing. Who'd have thought?
There's been a decades-long conventional wisdom borne out in every opinion poll that the political Right are better 'economic managers' of Western developed economies, an assertion that goes along with all the mythology of the household budget model of public finance, and with Reagan-Thatcher era public morality. For Gen X and our peers, the international political Right enjoy an unquestioned lock on the claim to be Better For The Economy, while the political Left suffers, at least journalists' framings, an assumed requirement to live up to austerity principles it disbelieves in.1
Or do they? Liz Truss's hilariously catastrophic Prime Ministership of the UK seems to have left the UK conservatives' economic reputation genuinely damaged. The United States' experiment with Trumpism seems to be continuing in that desire for disaster, and indeed destroying the whole concept of Economic Management, in favour of breaking as many eggs as possible in the hope that a delicious omelette will thereby be created. The European conservatives have, in the face of the Russian Army, just dropped the Eurozone austerity that was imposed throughout the 2000s and 2010s, and decided rearmament is the go regardless of domestic impacts. (Understandably).
It leaves the Australian political Right in an odd situation. They've always followed international trends and imported the received wisdoms from the Northern Hemisphere. But when those received wisdoms are, instead, examples of absolute nihilism and disaster, our domestic Right has a choice---continue in sync, and into disaster, with the overseas conservative and reactionary parties, or surrender the assumed better-economic-manager mantle.
Left un-asked, generally, are the questions 'what is the Economy anyway?' and 'better for who?' But that's just ideology. ↩
